Three Types Of Magical Fantasy Books

Books have drawn me to them ever since I was a kid. I was taken in not only by their stories but also by the tactile nature of books themselves. Older books had paper worn soft from people turning the pages over and over and creating smudges, wrinkles, and evidence of a well-loved copy. You could run your hand down a smooth front cover and smell the dusty scent clinging to the inside.

There was a sense of something a little like magic about books.
I’m not alone in this sentiment. Magical books have been a staple of fantasy throughout the genre’s history. Legends have circulated about spell books since antiquity. Incantations were written on clay tablets in cuneiform, and iterations of the folklore appear across the globe. Humanity, as far as we can tell, has always had a sense that the written word is magic. (Source: Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies)

Today, you’ll find many versions of magical books in the fantasy genre. We can divide these types of books into three basic categories: portal books, spell books, and reality-writing books. Whatever your purposes, and whatever the book’s mechanics, a magical book is a trope worth examining.

PORTAL BOOKS

The experience of reading a good book may often feel like you’re inside the story’s pages. You lose yourself in the plot, the characters, and an entirely different world brought to life in your imagination. As such, one of the staples of fantasy is portal books. Characters might open a story and be transported into the book’s world. The secondary world may be a place the author made up or a previously established literary classic.
A classic example is The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. The main character Bastian struggles with his mundane life and hides from bullies when he comes across a book titled The Neverending Story. He is eventually sucked into a land called Fantastica. This main character only travels in and out of the world once. And it takes a toll on the hero—he loses a memory with every wish he makes. The author uses the concept of a portal book as a means to express how getting lost in fantasy can lead to losing yourself.

For adult fantasy versions of the trope, you can turn to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. The story features BookWorld where literary characters exist independently from our world. These characters are self-aware and self-referential. They play their parts whenever someone is reading the book but otherwise live their own lives.

A literary detective named Thursday Next, other characters in her world, and sometimes literary characters in BookWorld can move in and out of multiple books. They can even have crossovers with the likes of Sherlock Holmes or Shakespeare. Portal books in this series are tools to explore Western culture’s relationship with its own imagination.

Additionally, the BookWorld allows for some very creative and funny world-building concerning the illegal selling of plot devices and enemies like “adjectivores,” which suck all description from an object.
Portal books experiment with the boundary of fiction and reality. They can delve into how imagination can clash with reality or how imagination shapes reality. The trope can be straightforward or complex and can lend readers a level of excitement as they play out the central fantasy: What would happen if I was pulled into my favorite story?

SPELL BOOKS

Grimoires are books that contain magical incantations and spells. Characters often discover a book that can imbue anyone who reads it with supernatural powers. Most scholars agree the word grimoire can be traced back to the old French word for grammar. The fact that grammar is connected to magical texts further reinforces a sense that written language has a mystical element we keep returning to. For the purposes of examining the fantasy genre, we will cover spell books with additional magical properties beyond written spells.

For some novels, spell books may be used as nonhuman teachers or benevolent helpers. In Melissa Erin Jackson’s paranormal cozy series, A Witch of Edgehill Mystery, any witch’s grimoire glows in response to a completed spell, turning the handwritten text into solid text once the spell works. In this instance, grimoires are esoteric assistants and can impress a sense of curiosity and whimsy in readers.

Grimoires can act as helpers, as antagonistic forces in stories, or as a chaotic combination of the two roles. We see a hostile version of a grimoire in the vampire novel The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. The main character discovers an unusual book with a dragon on the cover and secrets hidden within. Unbeknownst to them, the book summons Dracula and his minions to whoever possesses it. The conflict itself is created through a book of forbidden knowledge.

Spell books often operate akin to characters in their own right. They can be benevolent sources of instruction or else malevolent sources of conflict. Authors convey the theme that information has a life of its own. The widespread trope of spell books encapsulates the sense of wonder and power the written word can hold beyond the literal reality of ink and pages.

REALITY-WRITING BOOKS

Reality-writing books vary in their abilities but can broadly be divided into books that tell the future or books that record the present. The notion is the same. Reality is written down, and the text either determines the character’s ultimate fate or helps them change their destiny. The trope often plays with concepts of hubris or the power of self-determination.

Reality-writing books present opportunities to play with themes and ideas of agency. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman features canonically correct predictions by one of the main character’s ancestors. The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch predicted the upcoming end of the world, which the characters frantically work against.

The fated apocalypse trope is given a twist by way of the prophecies being esoteric and interpretable due to the old English vernacular and Agnes’s limited understanding of future technology. The overall themes of Good Omens are supported by their reality-writing book—and thus fate itself—being open to interpretation.

Some reality-writing books may go beyond reinterpretation and feature a text that can be edited and can thus edit reality itself. In Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones, the character Howard Sykes controls the actions of several other characters by typing them out on an enchanted typewriter and altering their reality and actions. The story focuses on siblings and covers themes of power struggles and manipulation. The reality-writing trope is a way for the author to give the characters an interesting struggle as well as to make readers consider complex familial dynamics.

Reality-writing books are a great way to add compelling magical components to stories. They can present unique puzzles for the characters to solve, and dilemmas readers want to know more about. They can additionally bolster characterization in places and add an extra dimension to various themes throughout a work.

TURNING THE PAGE

Cultures all over the world have been struck by the nature of words and the way books capture our imaginations and alter our perceptions. It’s no wonder the fantasy genre embraced magical books.
Books that suck you into a new world to face new challenges. Books that teach you fantastical information for better or for worse. Books that write your fate or change it.

These books often change the characters on fundamental levels and often are changed in turn by them, representing humanity’s complex relationship with our vast, and often magical, love affair with language and story.
What type of magical book do you like best? Leave a comment to let me know.

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